Thinking Yourself Thin
Your thoughts can have a powerful effect on your health and weight. Some things you’ll learn in this chapter are:
• How to transform your thinking so that it is an asset to your weight loss rather than a hindrance.
• How to create a vision of health that you desire to achieve.
• How to set specific, realistic, and measurable goals.
• How to identify emotional eating and create strategies to overcome it.
• Prayer and meditation can be powerful tools in your quest.
• Lightening up and laughing can improve your health.
The first place we must win the victory is in our own minds. If you don’t think you can be successful, then you never will be. If you don’t think your body can be healed, it never will be.
—Joel Osteen Your Best Life Now
You are what you eat, but you also are what you think. You can truly think yourself thinner and healthier as readily as you can mentally sabotage your health and weight loss.
The mind and body are inseparable. To look and feel years younger and be pounds thinner, the process begins in your mind. Food is powerfully connected with your emotions. Many of the reasons people eat—and, too often, overeat—have nothing to do with hunger, but instead with their feelings, habits, and addictions, which is a major reason that many people cannot lose weight or keep off the weight they lose.
What you conjure up in your mind is as important as what you prepare to eat. The Mental Pathway can lead you toward powerful ways of thinking and believing that help to prevent disease, renew vitality, and lose weight permanently. Few of us recognize the power of our own minds. Even fewer know how to effectively use that power. Learning how to visualize a slim new you, set reachable goals, and affirm your vision—out loud, especially—are critical steps toward weight-loss success.
Believe, in Order to Achieve
The activity of our mind affects every cell in our body. The reason that placebos work is that what we believe largely determines what we achieve. The body is an obedient servant. It does what you tell it to do. The body is listening every moment of the day, and we are all constantly giving it instructions, whether we are aware of it or not. Unfortunately, all too often those instructions are negative ones that only add to our problems. If you keep telling your body it is fat or sick, it will obediently comply and keep you that way. This makes it difficult to get well or lose weight. How much better it would be if you were, several times every day, to tell your body it is healthy and trim—right now! It eventually gets the message and follows your instructions.
We can use the incredible power of our brain to great benefit or waste, keeping us accomplished or defeated, youthful or debilitated, healthy or struggling with disease—including the disease of overweight. In too many ways and on too many days, we think small and we limit ourselves to mundane lives, making ourselves vulnerable to disease. Break out of this self-imposed mind-set, and you can harness the power of your thoughts and your beliefs in order to make radical changes in every realm of your life, including health and weight loss.
The Power of the Placebo
In his book Peace, Love and Healing, Dr. Bernie Siegel tells numerous stories that illustrate the power of the mind to control the body’s health. One amazing success involved a young boy struggling with the ravages of a brain tumor, and his parents, who used the power of thinking and believing to ease their son’s suffering and help restore his health.
The parents used words to create positive expectations in the boy which were strong enough to diminish the side effects of some very powerful anticancer drugs. . . . The first time he took his CCNV [antinausea] pill we also gave him the recommended anti-emetic to lessen the nausea. He got very sick that night and was on the couch all the next day. The next time we gave it to him we told him that you only get sick the first time. . . . He said he felt much better this time and was up and about all the next day.
The same patient lost his hair due to the cancer treatment, and a placebo worked powerfully again. “To restore his hair growth we rubbed a ‘magic mixture’ on his head and told him it would make his hair grow. It did! When we stopped using it, it quit growing, and started growing again when we resumed putting it on.”
In 1955, Dr. Henry K. Beecher, the first to mention the “placebo effect,” wrote “The Powerful Placebo,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Beecher concluded that about one-third of the people who receive medical treatment show improvement simply because they believe that the treatment they are using will work (recent research is showing that up to 75 percent is the result of the placebo effect, and the true number is probably higher yet). In Love, Medicine and Miracles, Siegel tells the story of a cancer patient who came back from the brink of death, from lethargy to vitality, with his cancerous tumors melting like snowballs after he received an injection of water that he believed was a powerful new anticancer drug. Make no mistake, belief is essential to success.
What image do you have of yourself? Perhaps it is time to do a mental inventory and reshape that image. You will never rise above the way you visualize yourself. Don’t focus on your fat or your weaknesses, but on your strengths. Envision your potential. Positive change rarely just happens. It must be envisioned, planned for, and sought after. Three practical steps can help you to harness the great power of your mind in order to optimize your health and well-being: visualize, set goals, and then put your mind to work.
It’s Your Vision: Make It Great
Sadly, most of us take more time to plan our shopping list than we do to plan ways to ensure a future that is free of disease, including overweight. Here is a suggestion: In the coming week, set aside five to ten minutes a day to sit quietly and think about what you want to achieve. Visualize yourself free of excess pounds, with toned muscles, smooth and glowing skin, full of energy—and a radiant smile. Picture your cells healthy and functioning together optimally. Envision your physical problems or discouragements replaced by vigor and accomplishment. Let your imagination go. Become empowered by a vision of this ideal you. Believe that it can become a reality. Periodically throughout the day conjure up this focused image. Cast off doubt and remind yourself that countless others have used the power of their visualizations to conquer their weaknesses and to transform their lives.
In an article titled “The Mind and Weight Balance,” published on the Hippocrates Health Institute website (www.hippocratesinstitute.org), Bob Del Monteque, a naturopathic doctor, tells how he was shocked when he ran into a formerly obese friend who now looked beautiful, fit, and years younger than before. She had always been a positive person; she had just lost herself in food. She told him that she had been able to transform her body using an unusual approach: She cut out a picture of the healthy, firm body of a well-known celebrity and replaced the star’s face with a photograph of her own face. She placed this image all around her home. She used her mental will, a plant-based whole-food diet, and regular exercise to become the hard-bodied youth she had never been. In eight months, she lost ninety-three pounds and became a body builder and aerobic enthusiast. She is an example of what each of us can create when our vision is focused.
Don’t Wander: Set Realistic Goals
Your next step is to set specific, measurable, and realistic goals. Goals are essential to help you chart how well you are doing and how much progress you are making. If you fail to set and work toward goals, you wander aimlessly. Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Les Hewitt, the authors of The Power of Focus, talk about the importance of goals: “Consider the alternative—just drifting along aimlessly, hoping that one day good fortune will fall into your lap with little or no effort on your part. Wake up! You’ve got more chance of finding a grain of sugar on a sandy beach.”
As you set goals, we encourage you to use the designated page in your NBFA Lifestyle journal to articulate them. (The pages for assembling this journal can be found in Appendices B and C. Complete instructions on preparing and using this journal are given in chapter 8. There is a section in this journal for you to list goals.) Think in terms of both short-term and long-term goals. In order for your goals to be empowering and motivating, they should be specific, measurable, and realistic. Don’t set vague goals such as “lose weight,” “get healthy,” “change my lifestyle,” and “start exercising.” Be specific. The more detailed your goals are, the more helpful they will be. Set a weight-loss goal of, say, thirty or fifty pounds. Better yet, further define the goal, for instance, to lose an average of two pounds a week or eight pounds a month (with the realistic objective of dropping fifty pounds in seven or eight months). This also allows for plateaus and accounts for the slowing of weight loss as you near your ideal weight. This kind of goal is both measurable and realistic. If three months pass and you have lost twenty-five pounds, you will able to see that you are on course.
List the specific ways you want to change your lifestyle, including daily plans for achieving them and methods you plan to use to accomplish each purpose. As you consider adding exercise into your life, be specific: What kinds of exercise? What time of day? Where? For how long? How many days each week? Remember to be realistic and devise a strategy for each goal. Be sure to include goals for each of the pathways described in this book, as all of the pathways are essential to your success. After you write each goal, reexamine your goal and see if you can make it even more specific so that progress will be easily measured. Continually remind yourself to be reasonable rather than set yourself up for discouragement by making your goals excessively optimistic or rigid. Your goals provide you with motivation and accountability, and writing them down makes them more powerful. Picture the desired result of each goal as you create it, and become invigorated by the anticipation. Take the time often to reread your goals, visualizing the changes ahead. Continually check on your progress. In this way, you pursue your dreams, rather than just passively hope they might happen someday.
If you want to make yourself even more accountable, you might consider sharing your goals with a few trusted individuals. Select positive, optimistic people who will be supportive during this process. Don’t waste time on pessimists; they are unable to help you visualize your achievements or encourage your pursuit.
Listen to Yourself, and Say It Out Loud
Now that you have visualized your future and set specific, achievable goals, it is time for action. Your first step is to believe that you can attain your goals. Begin each day with positive mental images of how you are changing. Affirm your dreams out loud. As you begin your day, repeat aloud positive affirmations. We all use affirmations, but many times we may get up and say, “I feel lousy,” or “I am so stupid.” Stop yourself when you are voicing negative affirmations and train yourself to think and speak positively. Here are some guidelines:
• State affirmations positively. Instead of saying “I am not fat,” say “I am lean and muscular.” Rather than “I am not tired,” try “I am full of energy.”
• State affirmations in the present tense as if they are already accomplished. Rather than “I will be disease free,” say “My cells function perfectly” or “I am healthy and strong.”
• State affirmations in language that your brain can readily accept. Don’t repeat flowery or artificial terminology or scientific words you have read if they are foreign to your way of thinking and talking. Your affirmations should sound like something you would naturally say.
• Keep affirmations short, picture what you say, and believe what you say. Repeat over and over—five times is a minimum.
• Affirmations should be stated aloud and with enthusiasm. Say it like you mean it and believe it: “Every day, in every way I am stronger and healthier!” Each time you repeat, be more emphatic. Since emotion is powerful, thoughts with emotion attached seem to have a greater impact on your mind. Hearing affirmations voiced with enthusiasm helps you to reset your mind and is vital to wellness.
• Begin with morning and evening affirmations. When you wake up, repeat them aloud; when you go to bed, say them again. Voicing them at bedtime allows your subconscious to dwell on them while you sleep. When you are unable to affirm out loud, don’t miss the opportunity and instead do your affirmations silently.
When you are in the middle of an activity, affirm its usefulness. During your workout, you can say, “As I lift these weights I tone and build my muscles.” “I am lean and fit.” “As I eat this nutrient-rich food, I am giving my body the raw materials it needs to build healthy cells that will result in radiant skin and a strong immune system.” “As I choose to forego temptations, I am choosing happiness rather than regret for my future.” When doubtful or negative thoughts ensue, don’t allow them to stay, but replace them by speaking the opposite aloud. You may be uncomfortable with all this at first—embarrassed even—but give it a chance because you will see that it does work.
Don’t Let Your Friends Derail Your Efforts
The people in our lives play a major role in our thinking and can help or hinder our progress. Surrounding yourself with positive and encouraging people can have a profound impact on you. You need accountability and support from those who believe in you and will inspire you to have confidence and stay on track. At the outset, think of one or two people who will support your efforts to adopt the NBFA Lifestyle. Sadly, this is not always easy. You may be amazed by how many people live in negativity. When you are tempted to throw in the towel, to indulge in foods that are harmful or to forsake exercise, have someone positive you can contact who will help you to make wise, reasoned, and informed choices rather than emotional ones.
Negative people who see mostly defeat and gloom, who seem to almost enjoy thinking the worst, will infect those with whom they come into contact. If you spend time with someone like this, it is necessary for you to find people to help you maintain enthusiasm and confidence. Talk with any naysayers in your life and gently ask them to keep their opinions to themselves if they cannot support you in this lifestyle change.
Your efforts to lose weight and stay healthy may also be sabotaged if your friends and family are themselves overweight and have poor eating habits (unless they are making changes with you). It is likely that what you enjoy doing together is eating unhealthy and fattening foods. Most social events and outings revolve around food—usually food that includes the toxic Big Four, which promote weight gain and disease. You don’t have to avoid these people, but you must be sure that they will not expect you to indulge with them. Seek to surround yourself with people who enjoy activities and other people more than they do junk food.
Are You Allergic or Addicted?
As we described in chapter 5, most overweight people are addicted to food, which is a powerful emotional force in overweight disease. One reason weight-loss diets don’t work is that they fail to address addictions, and most addicted people are totally unaware that they are addicted. Refer back to chapter 5 to remind yourself how “feel good” chemicals produced in the brain when eating simple carbohydrates such as refined grains and sugars, as well as the “feel good” chemicals produced as a result of allergic reactions to foods, affect your emotions and behavior regarding food. In most overweight people, both of these mechanisms are at work, causing an addiction to both refined carbohydrates and allergenic foods.
Avoid these addictive foods and allergens, which you first must identify. One way to do that is by fasting for six days on water and buffered vitamin C. This technique is safe, inexpensive, and remarkably useful, but best to do under a practitioner’s supervision. Reintroduce foods one at a time, recording how you feel—your emotions and your behaviors. You are most likely allergic to any food that causes you to feel tired, hot or flushed, have itchy eyes, runny nose, swollen fingers, puffy eyes, a bloated stomach, or skin eruptions.
Are You Eating Because You Are Hungry?
There are countless reasons for eating, and most of them have nothing to do with hunger. Food is, too often, an emotional crutch that we rely on to deal with trauma, loss, poor relationships, illness, fatigue, and other struggles. In order to successfully change your lifestyle, you need strategies to help you recognize and stop emotional eating behaviors. You cannot continue to seek solace in food and stay healthy and trim.
Emotional eating, also known as compulsive eating, is eating for reasons other than hunger. It is a major reason that many people can’t lose weight and keep it off. We are all programmed from infancy for emotional eating. When we cried, we were fed, but many times the cry was a cry of loneliness, discomfort, insecurity, boredom, sleepiness, anger, or something else. Since food was supplied as the solution no matter what the need, emotional eating became a learned behavior. Since we were comforted with food, we still turn to food for comfort when we are bored, angry, tired, lonely, stressed, or taxed in any way.
The best way to recognize emotional eating is by utilizing the NBFA Lifestyle journal. Accurately record everything you eat, and you will begin to notice when you eat for reasons other than hunger. As you record what you have eaten, ask yourself if you were hungry when you ate. Each time you eat when you are not hungry, or continue to eat after you are already satisfied, ask yourself why you ate and record your feelings next to what you ate. This record is the starting point for change. Once you know yourself and understand why you are eating when you are not hungry, you must come up with strategies for change.
Try also to identify the types of food you often turn to when eating emotionally. An insatiable desire for sweets or fatty foods could signal an addiction or allergy. Watch for patterns. Some of us turn to food in times of stress. If this is the case, another strategy for dealing with stress must be learned. If loneliness or boredom is a catalyst for eating, you must focus on solving those problems.
A second strategy, which may be more effective, is to have an activity planned that will keep you busy and prevent you from thinking about food or eating. Rebekah realized that often she engaged in emotional eating when she was bored. She would come home from work and eat for entertainment. She decided to join a singles group at church and also to plan something to do every evening, be it installing a new printer, arranging a file drawer, or finishing a knitting project. She also planned enjoyable events with friends or the church group, such as yoga class, swimming, or just getting together to socialize. These activities not only kept her away from food, but helped her increase physical activity, further assisting weight loss. Once Rebekah lost the first five or ten pounds, the rewards began to encourage her even more, and the habit of eating each evening was broken.
As a trigger for eating, stress is a little more difficult to predict and to establish a plan for combating. Stress really does increase chemicals in the brain that cause us to desire food—especially unhealthy food. According to a study published in the April 2004 Endocrinology, we produce cortisol when we are under stress, and cortisol stimulates the production of neuropeptide Y, which activates carbohydrate cravings. This same neuropeptide also causes the body to retain and store the new body fat that we produce. In addition, increased cortisol increases insulin, and high insulin leads to fat storage and retention. Thus, chronic stress can increase your weight.
When stressful circumstances occur, you must be ready with strategies. You may have to try various strategies until you find one that works. It may be helpful to close your eyes and to breathe slowly and deeply to oxygenate and calm your body. Other strategies: sip a warm cup of chamomile tea, take a soothing bath by candlelight, play calming music, or exercise vigorously.
Another strategy is to substitute healthy food choices for the foods with which you habitually seek comfort. If you eat anything during an emotional situation, allow yourself only a piece of your favorite fruit or raw vegetables with dip. By substituting a healthier food, you can drastically reduce the negative, calorie-loading behavior. The ultimate goal is to discontinue the pattern of emotional eating, but this may be an effective first step. You also can make an affirmation along these lines: “I only eat when I am hungry.” Repeat this whenever emotional eating tempts you. The counterpoint to emotional eating is to identify the specific emotions that trigger your eating and plan tactics for conquering those triggers. Understanding all this about yourself is key to your freedom from food domination.
Don’t Discount the Power of Prayer
We are not just bodies and minds; we are beings with a spiritual nature. Spirituality takes different forms for different people, but when that side of a person is ignored—when we neglect meditation and prayer—we miss a vital aspect of life and health. Scientific evidence confirms the correlation between physical health and “religion,” spirituality, and prayer. Most people in today’s society, however, do not consider spirituality as a necessary component for optimal health. They would probably be surprised to hear that their spiritual side is a key ally in weight loss, but we have seen the evidence time and again; the peace, joy, fulfillment, and contentment that accompany meditation and prayer are powerful healing agents. While science can not fully fathom the mystery of why or how prayer is so powerful in health and healing, studies and thousands of years of human history indicate that it is. In its simplest form, prayer can be defined as intention and attention. Similar to affirmations, the essence of prayer is giving attention to something along with a strong intention.
Larry Dossey, in his book Healing Words, reports one remarkable 1988 study undertaken by Dr. Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist at San Francisco General Hospital. In this study, 393 coronary care patients at the hospital were divided into two groups. One group, unbeknownst to them, was prayed for by home prayer groups while the other patients were not remembered in prayer. This was a double-blind study in which neither the patients nor their doctors and nurses knew the group assignments. The results were astounding. The group receiving prayer was five times less likely to require antibiotics, three times less likely to develop pulmonary edema, and not one required a ventilator, while twelve in the other group did. Additionally, fewer deaths occurred in the group receiving the anonymous prayers. As if these facts were not amazing enough, we can only imagine how much more effective the prayer may have been if the patients were aware of it or, even better, involved in the prayer groups. The encouragement provided by hearing the prayers of others on their behalf and pouring out their own minds and souls would seemingly have an even more powerful effect. Dossey calls prayer “one of the best-kept secrets in medical science.”
Another positive outcome of prayer is that it often takes our minds off of ourselves and our problems and causes us to focus on the needs of others. When we stop being so self-involved by realizing and praying for the needs of others, it often leads to actively reaching out to help others. At times this transfer of mental and physical energy alone brings positive physical rewards.
If you have a friend or group of friends who are also trying to change their lifestyle, why not join together and pray with and for each other? When you are tempted to eat unhealthy foods, pray for strength to resist. During workouts, meditation and prayer can pass the time and lift your thoughts from the hard work.
Laugh Off a Few of Those Extra Pounds
An equally powerful provider of health and wellness—including weight loss—is laughter. Ancient wisdom says that a cheerful heart is like good medicine. Science is proving this to be valid. Norman Cousins’s book Anatomy of an Illness describes how he brought about his own amazing recovery from ankylosing spondylitis (a connective tissue disease) using laughter as a key component. Cousins discovered that ten minutes of genuine, hearty laughter would ease his pain for hours. He used funny movies to ignite laughter, sparking profound health benefits.
The inspiring movie Patch Adams, based on the true story of a medical student, illustrates how humor, happiness, and laughter are used with medicine to help children and adults recover. Britain’s National Health Service actually opened a Laughter Clinic in the fall of 1991, and thousands of doctors, nurses, and medical professionals have trained there. There have been TV news stories on hospitals incorporating laughing rooms where patients can go to watch funny movies, read joke books, and enjoy laughter-provoking entertainment. Reports are that the patients who take advantage of these laughter rooms seem to have better chances of recovery and have quicker recoveries.
Most of us take life too seriously. The average child laughs about 150 times a day, while most adults laugh 10 or 15 times in a day. Robert Holden, a stress consultant, wrote an article published on the Internet called “A Dose of Laughter Medicine,” in which he states, “We don’t stop laughing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop laughing.”
An exuberant belly laugh thoroughly exercises the hundreds of muscles, nerves, and organs in your core body. This exercise not only burns calories, but releases chemicals, including endorphins, throughout your system. These endorphins have a morphinelike effect, hence Norman Cousins’s pain relief. They incite feelings of joy and well-being, giving us a natural high. Laughter lightens your mood, lifting stresses, discouragements, and tension. Further, your lungs absorb oxygen as you engage in hearty laughter, and your circulation is enhanced as blood vessels are opened. It is estimated that a prolonged period of laughter can increase blood flow equal to fifteen to thirty minutes of aerobic exercise. The science of psychoneuroimmunology, which is the fascinating study of how our state of mind affects our health, has shown that laughter even has a profound effect on the immune system. Just as suppressed anger, hatred, and bitterness hinder immune function, laughter supports the immune system. Research experiments of Drs. Lee Berk and Stanley Tan at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California have shown that laughter stimulates the immune system to produce white cells called T cells, which prevent infection. Laughter was also proven to increase natural killer cells, which are lymphocytes that erode tumors and battle viruses, along with gamma interferon, a disease-fighting protein.
Laughing as part of a group can promote a sense of belonging and bonding. Brain function is improved as we indulge in regular laughter because it stimulates both sides of the brain, keeping us alert. Laughter helps us feel hopeful. Laughter energizes us, a clear benefit for those trying to lose weight. What better way to “exercise”?
The NBFA Lifestyle urges you to practice purposeful smiling and to find more ways to laugh. Become a “smile millionaire.” Spend less time focusing on food and more time having fun. Since laughter is good for the cells, and healthy cells promote a healthy weight, learn to laugh again, find friends who make you laugh, and discover more joy in your life. In the process, you will most likely lose some pounds.
It’s Your Move
Simply considering all the information in this chapter does nothing for your health or your weight. Only when you make a determined commitment to change your life do you improve.
For many people, losing weight is something they “should” do to be more acceptable to others. That is not the right motivation. Losing weight is about ensuring a longer life with your loved ones, living with less disability, and enjoying a higher quality of living. The choice is yours, and all the power you need—an amazing capacity—is within your own mind. You can settle for knowing without changing, or you can use the knowledge you have gained to create change in your life. You can liberate yourself from food addictions, emotional eating, and negative thoughts, and envision a slim, healthy, spiritually fulfilled, and positive new person who is energized by a spirit of happiness and laughter.